Kelpie

It seems there were two kinds of fairy beasts, those that are magical in themselves with special powers and an independent way of life, fairies in animal form that is, and the fairy domestic animals, different from human cattle and often of a superior breed, but appurtenances of the fairies.

The seal people are a prime example of the first kind, a separate race, owned by nobody, friendly it may be with other sea-people, but not their property. Such creatures as the kelpie, though its proper form may be that of a horse, has powers of its own and appears to be no one else’s servant, though a magic bridle will enslave a kelpie for a time. Grahame of Morphie succeeded throwing such a bridle over the kelpie and forcing it to work at the building of his castle. When the castle was built and the kelpie was freed it cried, as it galloped off,


Sair back and sair banes,
Drivin’ the laird o’ Morphie’s stanes!
The lair’ds Morphie’ll never thrive
As lang as the kelpie is alive!

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature


SELKIE HARNESS

June 22

He sports the sea, ruthless
and rulerless, salt’s entropy
darting and devouring
through every drowned village
lost down the black chasms
of time. I reined him with
with harness of rolling foam,
line after line of wavelike rhythmus
which enchants him into
my work of sounding seas.
He makes of my song
something brutaller than craft,
a circulation of blue to black
and back like a feral
metronome swinging ball
to testicle in bedded thrall,
pouring music in thick
gysms, the mortar of
the sea’s wild organum.
My bricks thus soaked
they raise a cathedral
all the way up from down
there, a weaving glittering
edifice of waves intricate
as the scales of that fish
that harrowed the abyss,
whose tail still fans
deep-water tides infernally
here and there. Oh what
a building this is
just offshore sand-castles,
a work I could not attempt
without the selkie’s salt
plumline, which levels
with long rollers strung
between Thy heart and mine.
Oh how he will laugh
when this building is done,
rip a good one when
I lift the surf saddle
from his black haunches
and bid him farewell.
With a kick and a splash
he’ll be gone, down
the lengths of blue doom,
leaving me to wander
this dream of a castle
through paper rooms
in inked gloom, haunted
by the sound chambered
there like a nautilus
found on shores of first light --
A merry, distant song
fading in the last crashing wave,
selkie fins falling
under the last line
he helped me write,
erased of all the thunder,
ebbed down to pure white.




POSSE

5:30 a.m. here at the Vinoy
Renaissance Hotel next to the
St. Petersburg harbor, all of it
thick and luxurious as the
terrycloth robe in the closet
(which has a little card tucked
in a pocket saying, enjoy
me for your visit, but if you
take me your credit card
will be charged $55). It’s all
here if you want it and
can afford it, which I
do (who wouldn’t?) and
I can’t, the rooms at $160
a night for the Fla. Press
Association a fraction
of what they normally
cost and then paid for
by my company. This
has me here though I
really don’t belong and know
better than to soak in
it too much, because I
smell booze in its plush
folds, a short cut to
high times which would
destroy my marriage
& life in just one night.
Still the women look
so ravishing here, buxom
and lithe and looking
eagerly around in ways
they don’t in real days --
maybe they’ve gotten
the hots from all of
this material seduction,
dreary editors and reporters
no more -- who knows
what other stories
fill this hotel but someone’s
paying for it and the women
know to look their best,
perhaps the best money
can buy. The convention
so far has been a bust --
only two prospects came
by the first day -- the
trade show area only
half-filled with vendors,
we’re spread across too
large an area -- so this
is an expensive foray
for us, the company will
pay dearly for little results.
Well, maybe today will
be different. Odd shifts
today -- 7:30-10:30 a.m.,
11:30 a.m - 12:15 p.m.,
nothing then until 4:45
to 6:30 p.m.. and then
tear-down, if I stay
that long, making for
a very late drive home.
But I’ve got to make
good on this somehow
down there, and part
of that depends on what I
dredge up here in this
sea-bottomed soak of
blue songs. I’m still
trying to shake off
the two hours I spend
by the pool yesterday
afternoon, baking under
a brilliant hot sun &
slaking on pool-water &
trying not to look too long
at all the young women
everywhere wearing almost
nothing, feeling starved
for all of it yet refusing to
bite & feasting on the insides
of all that with a gusto that
cannot let go. I’m also
feeling the torpor of the
huge dinner we had last
night at a harborside bistro,
an aged NY strip, king crab
legs, asparagus & red potatoes
in a heavy sauce, a messy
heap of meaty goodness which
the shark in me glutted
delightfully on, staining my chops
with ravenous gore. I walked
back to the hotel in the last of daylight,
faint breeze off the gulf, , me
overdressed in overtight pants and
longsleeved shirt, sweating as I
watched couples approach & pass
from the other way in the
full flower of first love, joggers
jiggling, inline skaters in tandem,
all devout in the pour of late heat.
Inside the hotel sequinned
matronas flashed by with gay partners
in arm, headed for a hall where
a ballroom dancing competition
is underway, pure bodice-ripping
romance novel fancies blooded
in flashy faux bourees. Back up in
this room at 8:30 p.m., not
wanting to watch my bosses
drink half the night, I head to
bed & watch a porn flick where
tiny Asian women get fucked
every which way & try to sound
like they’re enjoying any of it.
Slept hard, roused refreshed
at 4 a.m. All of that makes this
hour here seem so small and
useless, whatever collective
energy I wring from blue depths
of no use at all in this world
of indulgence and pleasure,
invisible and empty. Boy, does
this place ever make the life I work
so hard to give harbor to and
ground seem insignificant -- my
wife and I suffer so just to
get by, take our grievances knock
after knock, take no vacations,
enjoy no libations, luxuries,
hardly any sex -- And for what?
The privilege of laying down
inchoate lines of verse no
one will ever read? This stuff
inks on the page like a posse
of horses up from the mere,
beautiful and unchaste, wild,
trampling every opportunity
to make a decent buck. I know
all this but love too much
the sound of wet fairy horse-hooves
on the shore, stamping off
the depths and translating it to a
nocturnal land purpose, greedy
and nameless as the shadow
under my hand. Gotta S&S soon,
get this show on the road, make
something out of the nothing
summed by all of this luxury
& git my ass on home to where
real life and love trudges on.
Suffice here to say that the lust
of that posse isn’t expendable
and not worth a penny. If there’s any
bridle for them here, its
the wild indifferent page
which always greets their
black wet hooves with a
lover’s patience, happy
to wait & write their
wild and boundless ends.





CLOSING THE DEAL

1990

You stand at the window of your
hotel room, naked and wet from the pool.
Heavy curtains pull back to reveal
palm trees winnowing lazy fronds.
A fountain spouts glass into the
brilliant Florida sky. You feel its deeper
possibilities lift and cast you,
like spray, into the sun. A yearning
infinitude. Your skin burns with it.

All this first class treatment proves
how weak their deal really is:
the black jet that muscled you south,
this hotel of marble and brass,
bright servants, iced salmon
on pale porcelain, golf fairways
neater than carpet, poolside women
in neon bikinis serene in
the torpor of water and sun.
All of this shouts disaster at you.

Later you head for the bar.
You sit on a wicker barstool
sipping a tall glass of rum and fruit.
A combo pulses moody tropic jazz.
Slowly spinning fans whisper
in their tireless cradles:
first class, first class, first class.
How could they know you’d tremble?

As sheets of satin booze settle
over your eyes, you find yourself
wanting to drowse forever in this descent,
to fall gently on all dotted lines,
a chunk of pineapple sinking in rum,
one with whom any deal can be made:
just pour on that dark bossa nova, bartender,
and let the music fade blue to black.




The legends of the doings of the water kelpie all point to some river god reduced to a fuath or bogle. The bay or grey horse grazes at the lakeside, and when he is mounted, rushes into the loch and devours his rider. His back lengthens to suit any number; men’s hands stick to his skin; he is harnessed to a plough, and drags the team and plough into the loch, and tears horses to bits; he falls in love with a lady, and when he appears as a man, and lays his head on her knee to be dressed, the frightened lady finds him out by the sand amongst his hair. “Tha gainmheach ann,” “There is sand in it,” she says, and when he sleeps he makes her escape. He appears as an old woman and is put to bed by a bevy of damsels in a mountain sheiling and he sucks the blood of all, save one, who escapes over a burn, which, water horse he is, he dare not cross. In short, these tales and beliefs have led me to think that the old Celts must have had a destroying water god, to whom the horse was sacred, or who took the form of a horse.

-- J.F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the Western Highlands, Orally Collected, 1890


THE AWFUL HOOVES
OF GOD

June 24

There are gods of awe like
Zeus or Apollo, magnitudes
of light which so zap the mind
and spirit with brightness
that the world’s jaw hangs agape
in stunned hosannah.
But there are also gods
of awfulness limned in
those high gods’ shadows
who rip that jaw away
in a torrent of wild blue,
a stampede of river-nixies
no religion myth or poem
can prettify or precede.
His source is behind
the springtide roar of waters
down the plain, his feral
sex engorging way past
the banks to haul off
all who linger there --
washermaid, dreamy
shepherd, crone and
fisherman -- he doesn’t
care, he sweeps away,
he consumes. What ire
in the world conspires
to devour its votives,
leaving behind a
harrowed shore -- a shoe,
a shift, a prayer of
praise pinned to a branch?
And though no one’s
seen him in days for
a thousand years, he’s still
throned in those waters
on a horse of black
desire, arising after
midnight in the gloaming
of the dream. Nicht Naught
Nothing, Bogie Fuath, brute
wreaker with the black
hooves & balls bluer than
the sea's, he rides up
from the smoothness
on a current we can’t see
but welcome out of some
need only dreams understand
and they’re inchoate, gibberish
like the sibyl’s song beneath
a gibbous moon, the babble of
the madman who faced
the madness square on
at the bend in the river
just outside of town
where something’s always
rising, ah, dripping
with unknowns,
his eyes so black and vast
they door the stars’ cold
infinites. He shakes his
mane -- ropes of black silk --
and then his haunches,
which dry fast into familiars
we can name - my brother,
the mean black kid in
the locker room, James
Bond’s Blofeld, the boss from
hell, the witchy woman rising
from a bar’s whiskey well,
the mother dam with
her strange low-high tides --
nightmares all who are
only water I once drowned
in and ferry my days now
over, for better and for worse.
He’s not the sort you
ring church bells for, nor
saint in sacristies,
but there he is, the
darker half of the pantheon,
cruel and ruthless
and so virile blue
as to vibrate what remains
with that flooded river’s stain,
a breadth which takes
my psyche’s breath away.




NUCKELAVEE

Nuckelavee was a monster of unmixed malignity, never willingly resting from doing evil to mankind. He was a spirit in flesh. His home was the sea; and whatever his means of transit were in that element, when he moved on land he rode a horse as terrible in aspect as himself. Some thought that rider and horse were really one, and that this was the shape of the monster. Nuckelavee’s head was like a man’s, only ten times larger, and his mouth projected like that of a pig, and was enormously wide. There was not a hair on the monster’s body, for the very good reason that he had no skin.

If crops were blighted by sea-gust or mildew, if live stock fell over high rocks that skirt the shores, or if an epidemic raged among men, or among the lower animals, Nuckelayee was the cause of all. His breath was venom, falling like blight on vegetable, and with deadly disease on animal life. He was also blamed for long-continued droughts; for some unknown reason he had serious objections to fresh water, and was never known to visit the land during rain.
I knew an old man who was credited with having once encountered Nuckelavee, and with having made a narrow escape from the monster’s clutches. This man was very reticent on the subject. However, after much higgling and persuasion, the following narrative was extracted:—
Tammas, like his namesake Tam o’ Shanter, was out late one night. It was, though moonless, a fine starlit night. Tammas’s road lay close by the seashore, and as he entered a part of the road that was hemmed in on one side by the sea, and on the other by a deep fresh-water loch, he saw some huge object in front of, and moving towards him. What was he to do? He was sure it was no earthly thing that was steadily coming towards him. He could not go to either side, and to turn his back to an evil thing he had heard was the most dangerous position of all; so Tammie said to himself, “The Lord be aboot me, any tak’ care o’ me, as I am oot on no evil intent this night!” Tammie was always regarded as rough and foolhardy.

Anyway, he determined, as the best of two evils, to face the foe, and so walked resolutely yet slowly forward. He soon discovered to his horror that the gruesome creature approaching him was no other than the dreaded Nuckelavee. The lower part of this terrible monster, as seen by Tammie, was like a great horse with flappers like fins about his legs, with a mouth as wide as a whale’s, from whence came breath like steam from a brewing-kettle. He had but one eye, and that as red as fire. On him sat, or rather seemed to grow from his back, a huge man with no legs, and arms that reached nearly to the ground. His head was as big as a clue of simmons (a clue of straw ropes, generally about three feet in diameter), and this huge head kept rolling from one shoulder to the other as if it meant to tumble off. But what to Tammie appeared most horrible of all, was that the monster was skinless; this utter want of skin adding much to the terrific appearance of the creature’s naked body,—the whole surface of it showing only red raw flesh, in which Tammie saw blood, black as tar, running through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as horse tethers, twisting, stretching, and contracting as the monster moved.

Tammie went slowly on in mortal terror, his hair on end, a cold sensation like a film of ice between his scalp and his skull, and a cold sweat bursting from every pore. But he knew it was useless to flee, and he said, if he had to die, he would rather see who killed him than die with his back to the foe. In all his terror Tammie remembered what he had heard of Nuckelavee’s dislike to fresh water, and, therefore, took that side of the road nearest to the loch. The awful moment came when the lower part of the head of the monster got abreast of Tammie. The mouth of the monster yawned like a bottomless pit.

Tammie found its hot breath like fire on his face: the long arms were stretched out to seize the unhappy man. To avoid, if possible, the monster’s clutch, Tammie swerved as near as he could to the loch; in doing so one of his feet went into the loch, splashing up some water on the foreleg of the monster, whereat the horse gave a snort like thunder and shied over to the other side of the road, and Tammie felt the wind of Nuckelavee’s clutches as he narrowly escaped the monster’s grip.

Tammie saw his opportunity, and ran with all his might; and sore need had he to run, for Nuckelavee had turned and was galloping after him, and bellowing with a sound like the roaring of the sea. In front of Tammie lay a rivulet, through which the surplus water of the loch found its way to the sea, and Tammie knew, if he could only cross the running water, he was safe; so he strained every nerve. As he reached the near bank another clutch was made at him by the long arms. Tammie made a desperate spring and reached the other side, leaving his bonnet in the monster’s clutches. Nuckelavee gave a wild unearthly yell of disappointed rage as Tammie fell senseless on the safe side of the water.

—- Mr. W. Traill Dennison in the Scottish Antiquary







CISTERN OF ENDS

June 25

Dazed black heat at 5 a.m.,
storms still not delivering the
knockout punch which sates
the rainy season - way late this
year -- held back like a good
bowel movement or long-delayed
fuck, gritting the teeth of the
male in the night, turning the
woman of the night away in her
sleep -- no children in the womb,
eternal care of old parents, wrinkles
and grey hair. You know. Violet
sleeps on her side on the couch --
vulnerable for a cat, trusting I guess --
and Mamacita’s laying on the front
porch doorstep, a new rhythm
there, she’s staying round most
of the day, needy for love and food --
bonding in a different, more enhanced
way, we figure she’s lost her old
roosting spot down the street
with new occupants or a dog
nearby. I write on for no reason
but that I write, cashiering the
nipples of blue nougat I find,
a flexion of ink and Platonic sooth.
Without much purpose anymore,
not hoping to publish or find
readers in a blog or pique
interest anywhere else; I’ve put
this stuff out there long enough
to feel fully the contempt of
indifference, confirming the feeling
I’ve had for long that this
is only between me and You,
dear Lord, a colloquy built
for two, nigh and amen.
I wonder if a growing certainty
of this is throwing the whole
enterprise down the same
well I lost my guitar down years
ago. This season of songs like
those two or three years
when I continued to play
on a guitar whose pitch
and thunder had long
drowned. That guitar
seemed to sink for years
through my hands into
a pit which eventually
completely silenced it,
though the songs had
a long half-life, not
so much in their note
as in what I once believed
summed magnitude and
squall. I write line after
line of a long-ebbed tide,
harrowing a shore I haven’t
walked down for years,
singing to a sea I learned
long ago wasn’t calling
me at all. How many
miles of verse down the
page did it take to
fully eviscerate that
lonely blue rage at
departure and emptiness
and salt-sounding
blue seem, the equivalence
of words and the womb
which refuses all of them?
Does a massive second
turn slowly now announce
itself in the past year
of drone over the same
futile empty hunting
grounds a mile out to sea?
When will I have said it
again enough to never
need sound it again?
What will fall from my hands,
the same old themes
or the pen itself? Or
maybe all words ...
I certainly feel I’ve done
my job, pulled on
these oars long and hard
enough, perambled every
isle singing Manannan’s
lost name, catelogued every
sweet curve offered
to me beneath the moon,
drained the entire pantheon
of its feral hungry high croon:
And still found myself
on a white writing chair
in the first clusters of light
wearier than ever of writing,
desperate for more shut-eye,
some rain, a bowel movement,
good sex. Can any trope
nipple the milk I’ll never suck
past my lips? I’ll leave
that to You, heavy thick night
like a blueballed lover
forever waiting to plunge
his love to the lees.
Here’s another draught
to cistern in Your great
receipt of without.
Not that I expect an
answer anywhere else
than in what I say here.
It makes planning
difficult, and ending far worse.
No wonder the lines
go on down the page
a mile past their true ends,
unsatisfied, droning on
the same epiphantic
carols of bliss -- O
consummate kiss under
and through all of this! --
reverting to rhyme when
there’s nothing to name,
and finally just tired,
spent, seeking the first
door to get the hell on
out of here -- cats to
feed, a wife to wake
who will hopefully
be in the mood, a million
Sunday chores to fork
into the next hot day’s
wide maw. Maybe what
is left is the boy in the
woods still dropping
his shorts to show You
his, dear Lord, wondering
if she’ll every show
her Yours too, remitting
my words with pale clefted
rounds which inserts
a proper enough heft
of awe back into this
awful sing song, and hang
something sufficient
there on the last line.
A period is door enough
for an amen. But instead,
I look out the garden
window and see the
faintest white cumulus
rising above the house
across the street, glowing
with the silvery magnetos
of first life, the titan of
my ire, auguring rain at last
perhaps, movements
of bowel and testicle,
augments I’ll take any
day over the sound of
surf repeatedly plowed over here.



TAKAMIME ACOUSTIC

My last guitar

(The final poem
from “A Breviary of
Gutars,” 2000)

Fall 1986: That
blue Hamer guitar
died oh so slowly
but surely, like
a dream that
had run out of
further rooms
or a man who
can’t find any
new ways to
believe his song
could yet be
both pretty and
true. I towed the
Hamer with
me from mother’s
house to roommate’s
house, but hardly
ever played it.
The old riffs so
heavy with what
could not go
forward.

Nor could I
gambol any
more in those
henhouses of
eternal beginning
So I began to
take stock of
things in my
journal, accounting
less frequently
the previous night’s
desertions of sense
as looking back
over the past
as at a world
that never knew
its day. An
Orpheus looking
back on his
life’s fade. When
a puer enters his
own history
he is said
to finally find
substance in the
world, his blue
hops in the
aether grounded,
his heart slowing,
his dreams
digesting insoluble
agonies.

I put pen to paper
and the ink
flowed like blood.
Open wounds cast
on the page
became the
coagulates of
that old rage.

Ah but slowly.
There were more
bad nights foraging
badly for bad
women or simply
drinking badly
until a blackout
night in April
1987 when I came
to in jail for
DUI. The rock god
found his peerage
at the bottom of
his cups. Some guy
vomiting in a
toilet, another
mumbling prayers
within a sodden
hood. Such was the
beginning I grew
through. The judge
prescribed community
service and AA.
I taught English
at a vo-tech for
a season, my
AA nights lasted
8 years. In that
span I woke,
or sort of.
Thousands of
cramped rooms
confessing sins
big and small,
learning how
to walk and talk
from others
who’d earned their
wise words.
I married
unsuccessfully.
I entered therapy
and began unlocking
doors which opened
to psychology
and myth and
poetry. Through
all this I entered
time at last, finding
that substance
can only come
with time.
Surrendering
to the nails.

I traded my
amp for a
Takamime acoustic,
my blue Hamer
for a synthesizer
I’ve never played.
Tried to make
new music but
nothing assembled
or sang: ditties a
nd progressions
played on the porch,
none ending,
one dithering
into the next
like the bottom
of a halved
worm writhing
brainlessly.

I still dreamt
of stages and
fantastical
guitars, schmoozing
with David Bowie
or Peter Gabriel,
dallying with
groupies, but
I always woke
sober and eager
to get back to
work in the
study for an hour
or two before
heading to my
job. I listened to
jazz, classical,
new age, pumping
to rock anthems
only when
I lifted weights,
when testosterone
cocksurety blossoms
from the body’s
gallop and preen.


2.

I dreamed also
of pianos, rich
sonorous baby
grands of cherry
and mahagony
and teak which
turned up
everywhere ---
in forgotten rooms
of my childhood
house, in stockrooms,
by the sea,
squat in the
middle of a bayou.
Usually a woman
was nearby,
not young but
not old,
mysterious and
fair, not so much
sexy as deeply
loved. Was she
the mediatrix
bridging song
to poetry, her
body a cathedral
of the world’s
music I came
to know only
by dying to my
own music?
Eliot saw her
in the “A Game
of Chess” section
of “The Wasteland,”
a Dido like a lush
crown in an ornate
throne room,
jewelled with the
sea of ancient
myth, Thetis
ringed with gold
cupidon and ivory
viols of perfume.
He knew her well.
The same woman
and her pianos
drew me into
this history, ever
at the margins
of my verse
journal, always
flashing a smile
just beyond my
last line of the day.
And somehow
inaccessible from
the guitar I threw like
a hammer. “Forget that
passionate music,”
said Rilke’s Orpheus.
“ It will end.
True singing is
a different breath,
about nothing.
A gust inside
the god. A wind.”


3.

I’m still not sure who the dolphin rider,
my totem guide and logo, serves.
I can name many candidates:
Eros attendant of Aphrodite,
Apollo Delphinus guide of souls
to the heavenly spheres,
Dionysos who turned a rabble
of pirates into dolphins, saving the
navigator to become a priest of
doom to mind-blind Pentheus.
I was born with a tattoo of
a heart with an arrow through it
and the dolphin man rides there
somehow, lover and lyre like strands of
a helix wrapped around my heart,
both pierced by some need
for reaching a vanished Beloved.
So it’s somehow important
to ask the waters even though
I know I’ll never truly know.

Cupid’s darts were dipped
in gold or lead. Which metal
is buried in my birthmark?
Perhaps fool’s gold, since
the simplest lessons
have been so difficult.
You can seduce a woman in
a night and learn to play
a song in less than that time
and such beginnings make
you soar, delight in making love
and making song a gallop over
the yeastiest, fomenting waves.
But to truly make love? To truly
sing? Forget that passionate music.
Three years with my wife and I’m
still working on the harmonies,
loving her for just who she cares to be
and trying to find the courage
to let her know my fully dappled desires.
And the poetry, well, as my friend
Peter Meinke once told me,
It takes decades. So I’m doomed
to shuffle these words many times
before they tell me much more.

I liken the rider to Manannan,
the Irish sea-god whose ripe valleys
looked like sea-crests to voyaging Bran.
The way you think it is is not
the way it is at all -- that’s a Celtic
promise, delivered from the Otherworld
through the mouth of just unearthed
Oran when Saint Columba decided
he needed to look upon the martyr’s
face once more, up out of the
abbey foundations he’d been sacrificed
to on hard-winded, heavy-oceaned Iona.
Oran had voyaged with Manannan,
and his truth is this: when you think
you’ve arrived at the the nut-busting
uttery of truth, this sign lowers down
from nowhere saying Not Here,
meaning the ripeness on the other
side of the wall is everything
and we can never know it:
So for us the troping’s all:
and just when my metaphors
of love and lyre seemed sweetly true
the song dove elsewhere,
drowning this rider.

A few years back, soon
after my first marriage died,
I had the dolphin rider
tattooed high on my left arm.
(Stole the image from Riverside
Editions). The location was
appropriate: Pelop’s shoulder,
shank of dolphin, a hero’s portion.
Many princes were imaged riding
what was oncecalled The Lion of the Sea --
Arion, Cadmus, Enalus,
Theseus, Coeranus, Taras,
Phalanthus -- and it makes for
a popular tale, as my tale of
the guitar hero kept me warm
on the many mornings of its telling.
Take Arion, a great musician
whose song saved him from
drowning when he was thrown
to the sea by pirates. A dolphin
in love with the music bore
him back to shore. That’s
just one of the stories. I’ve learned
that each life is rammed with
many lives, many tales.
Don’t think you ever come
to rest. Pelops means “dusky faced,”
shadowy and indistinct, as
Manannan was in his grey
cloak of invisibility. Pelops was
served up in a stew by Tantalus, his
father, up to the gods; the gods
realized the taboo and restored
Pelops to life. Only the shoulder
had been eaten and the gods
restored that part with the shoulder
of a dolphin. A sea beast god ruled Pelops
tribal Peloponnese, a lusty beast
of strength charging up the river
Styx.
Proteus tended the herds
of Poseidon the mare-tamer, and is
identified with Pallas, sea beast.
Proteus, misty faced changeling,
is both Callas and Salmoneus, the
human oak-king, as Llew Llaw Giffes
the Welsh antecedent of Irish Lug,
master of many crafts and somehow
son of Manannan ...

Are you weary
yet of the transformations? I get
lost too. That’s why I have the tattoo.
(Looks cool, too.) Lusty young man
on his ocean steed racing from the sea
up the river of the mother, singing
his gorgeous tune. Now there’s a metaphor
for the guitar man, the lover, the man
now poet and married man. Gorgeous
enough and true? We’ll see. The tales
continue to spin and transform.
What’s next? Ask the rider and
don’t be surprised if it doesn’t
make any sense until the present
dives into the next transformation.


4.

It’s raining now and
I must close this journal and head
to the john to ready for work.
Buster ansy at the door and my wife
coughing in her sleep. This house
so richly affords all we love, and
makes itself a home as we make
love and life within it. A story
of its own which has been patient
while I complete an older story
of guitars. I still have that Takamime
guitar: it’s tombed in my closet.
Will it ever wake? Will the ink dry
some day and that old music
rise and crest the surface
in a glitter of spray? Who knows.
Listen now to the rain’s soft
sursurrations, sighing
wait ... there is this ...